Part of the US-Mexico border wall, painted by members of the Brotherhood Mural organisation in Tijuana

Guillermo Arias · Afp · Getty

From Sierra Vista, Arizona, it’s only a few kilometres along dusty roads to Mexico. Retired businessman Glenn Spencer has a ranch on a hill close by the border, and gets up at 3am every day to listen to the US Border Patrol (USBP) talking on their radios.

Spencer is a legend in anti-immigration circles. He established his own border watch organisation, American Border Patrol, writes a blog (1), is very active on social networks and boasts he was among the first to come up with the theory of the reconquista, a Mexican conspiracy to invade the US. This doctrine, popular with the alt-right, holds that immigration from Mexico is motivated by revenge for the military defeats of the 19th century, which led to the US annexation of a huge area of Mexican territory.

Donald Trump’s election delighted Spencer, along with 49% of voters in Arizona (nearly 4% more than voted for Hillary Clinton). Spencer, who is over 80, has seen anti-immigration crazes come and go, including the armed vigilantes who appeared in Arizona after 9/11, patrolling the desert in battledress in the hope of intercepting migrants and drug traffickers. Their leaders are dead, in prison or forgotten. According to Spencer ‘they were bound to fail. Just imagine those guys up on a hill on sun loungers, with beers and AK-47s. Totally ineffective. They died of boredom.’

His methods are more modern: he has installed seismic sensors at regular intervals across his property, and dreams of the technology being used along all 3,145km of the US-Mexican border. After 14 years of development, with the help of a small but dedicated team, the sensors ‘can tell the difference between a coyote, a vehicle and a cow,’ Spencer claims. He used to work in seismic oil exploration; now he tracks humans.

As the sun rose, Spencer gave me a demonstration. An assistant walked away from the ranch house, and the sensors, buried at 73-metre intervals, detected his footsteps and transmitted their measurements to a control screen. A French-made Parrot drone (‘they’re the most reliable’) was launched, to film the intruder with a facial recognition programme. ‘It can give orders, too: Cuidado! or Go back! That kind of thing.’ Spencer laughed at the idea of a concrete wall. His system of sensors and drones ‘would finally allow us to know who is coming across the border, and collect accurate data. It’s better for the environment too: wildlife is free to cross at any time.’

Tenders for the wall

In March, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an invitation to tender for the construction of the long-promised wall. Along with more than 400 companies, from startups to defence industry giants, Spencer sent in his proposal, a 12-page document that represented his life’s work.

Trump wants a wall 10, 15 or even 24 metres high — it changes from day to day — and in June he suggested an ecological barrier covered in solar panels. Whatever form the wall takes — visible or invisible, lasers or concrete — it will be funded by the taxpayer, though Trump insists that Mexico will pay. The administration aimed to make a decision by the summer, but nothing has gone to plan. Congress has dragged its feet, Democrat-controlled states threaten to boycott participating companies, and in April Mexico came up with a legal hurdle: a treaty from 1970 that makes it illegal to build any structure that disrupts the flow of rivers that define the border. In May, Trump asked Congress for $1.5bn, to add just 120km to the existing barrier. This is more than revising his ambitions downwards, and some Republicans in Congress already talk of the wall, a key feature of his election campaign, as being just a metaphor (2).

Trump’s skill was his ability to make voters believe that the border was a sieve. In fact it is already heavily militarised and guarded, and he will at best be adding a thin layer of protection. The wall already exists, cutting towns in half and closing popular crossing points. Every president since Bill Clinton (1993-2001) has added to it.

The town of Nogales, in the desert 100km south of Tucson, is divided by a fence of rusty steel beams, six metres high. You can see through, and lovers can touch hands, but not kiss. The last McDonald’s before Mexico has a sweeping view of the shantytowns on the hillside across the border. Below them is the ‘port of entry’ of Nogales, a huge marshalling yard for goods and people.

‘It’s mostly for show’

On the Mexican side, Nogales is livelier, and dirtier. After you clear customs, there are stalls selling Viagra and Cialis, and dental practices. Dental care is a quarter of the price it is in the US, and retired gringos come from as far away as Alaska to get fitted for a bridge. The town gets by as best it can. Since 9/11, the border has been even more tightly controlled, scaring away the tourists.

‘We fought to bring down the Berlin Wall, and look what they’ve built now,’ said Jésus (3), a US-Mexican dual national and Vietnam war veteran who retired to Arizona and comes back to Nogales at weekends for a few beers. He remembers when crossing the border just meant stepping over a cattle fence. He used to cross to work in the copper mines of Wyoming. It was hard work, and he would come out of the tunnels with ice on his beard. Jerking his head towards the wall, he said: ‘It’s mostly for show. People are always going to find a way under, or over.’The locals have hung it with wooden crosses in memory of migrants who died, and daubed it with angry graffiti: ‘Pinche migra’ (Fuck the border patrol).

The border at Nogales is that of a country at war. Since 2001 the US has spent more than $100bn defending itself against Mexico, more than the combined budgets of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Secret Service. The USBP has all the latest technology. The border towns of Tijuana, Nogales, Agua Prieta and Juaréz are covered by a grid of infrared cameras, drones that fly too high to be seen with the naked eye, and agents in forest green uniforms patrolling in huge all-terrain vehicles.

The fence separating the US (left) from Mexico (right) isn’t stopping migrants crossing the border

Christopher Morris · Corbis · Getty

Surveillance towers built by Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems, tested on the Israel-Palestine border, watch the desert. Their purchase was approved by President Obama in 2014 at a cost of $148m. An analyst at the time said: ‘If we paid the migrants not to come it would probably be cheaper’ (4). Deportations surged during Obama’s presidency, possibly reaching three million between 2009 and 2016, more than under any other 20th-century president. This figure, which earned Obama the nickname ‘deporter-in-chief’, should be treated with caution. Since 2005 each deportation has been recorded; before then, interceptions close to the border were often processed informally and not necessarily reflected in statistics (5).

The balance of migration has certainly changed. Since the 2008 financial crisis, more Mexicans are crossing to Mexico than in the other direction. After many years of hard work, they are going back to Mexico to retire, while the numbers going to the US have fallen sharply: between 2009 and 2014, 870,000 left for the US, down from 2.9 million between 1995 and 2000. In 2015, according to a study by the Pew Research Centre, 33% of Mexicans said the quality of life was ‘about the same’in Mexico and the US (up from 23% in 2007) (6). Trump’s election seems to have further slowed the influx. In January and February 2017, the number of migrants caught by the USBP fell by 40% (7); in preceding years, it tended to rise in spring.

Shelter for migrants

After a period of detention, undocumented migrants intercepted by the Tucson patrol are taken by bus to Nogales, where they are released. Exhausted, they find shelter at El Comedor, a soup kitchen run by nuns. To reach it, they have to pass the municipal cemetery, where gravestones sometimes serve as beds. Deportees are easily recognised by the sky-blue polo shirt and the clear plastic bag they are given on release, which holds all their possessions, sometimes including money. Their first priority is to find new clothes: dressed this way, they are easy targets for bandits.

Behind El Comedor’s padlocked grille, 30 migrants sat at six big tables, looking lost. Sister Alicia cajoled and advised the newcomers, welcoming them with a smile and a cup of hot chocolate. Some had been caught trying to cross the desert; others had been living in the US for years and had been arrested while driving, for failing to indicate before turning — a common tragedy of the undocumented. A mobile phone was being handed round so they could call their families. The nun in charge of the phone carefully deleted the dialling history: ‘If it fell into the wrong hands, someone could use it to extort money from their families, pretending that they have been abducted.’

None of the deportees were from Nogales: they came from the rural south — Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca — where they had earned barely enough to buy corn to feed their chickens. Some did not speak Spanish, but a native dialect. ‘Poverty and cartel violence are the two main reasons for emigrating,’ said Joanna Williams of Kino Border Initiative, a bi-national NGO that funds El Comedor.

Before breakfast, the migrants put their hands together and murmured a prayer to the Virgin. Sister Marivel filled in a questionnaire on behalf of each migrant: ‘Were you robbed/raped/abducted/beaten? By your guide/the Mexican police/the US Border Patrol/members of a criminal gang? Please tick all the relevant boxes.’

Salvador told me how stupidly he had failed: he hadn’t even got as far as trying to cross the desert. His guide left him in the middle of nowhere, on the Mexican side of the border, telling him he was already in the US. ‘He seemed trustworthy.’ Salvador paid him the $3,000 that his nephews, who pick grapes in California, had borrowed to pay for his passage. The guide and his 4×4 disappeared in a cloud of dust. For the last 25 days, he had been sleeping on the ground at the Nogales lorry park, eating and washing at El Comedor. He planned to hitch a ride back to Michoacán, ‘where the monarch butterflies have just hatched’. One fewer undocumented worker for the wine harvest in California.

Cartels to be paid

Uriel, was fidgeting, a wild look in his eyes. He spoke border slang, in which migrants are pollos (chickens), guided by a pollero (chicken herder), often young and little better off. Next in the hierarchy is the coyote, with a 4×4 and smartphone, in contact with the cartel. The bosses are far away; they give the orders and take the plata (money). The militarisation of the border has created a market as profitable as the drug trade. To become a guide, taking people across in groups or singly, you have to pay the cartels. Try it without asking, and you sign your own death warrant. Drug and people trafficking are merging, with migrants forced to carry 25kg packages of drugs to pay their way.

Uriel saw himself as a super-migrant. He had crossed the desert five times to work in construction in California. Each time, he paid the coyotes around $2,000. He is a Mexican army veteran, and told me his tricks for surviving in the desert, including how to dig a hole and line it with a plastic bag to collect dew. As he told the story, his hands skimmed over the table as if he was sweeping up poker chips. His group had consisted of a guide, four pollos (two of them women), and himself. ‘The pollos wanted water all the time, and complained about everything. Cry-babies.’Uriel didn’t say how he had been caught, but the group had slowed him down; next time, he would go alone.

Over the years, the US has locked everything down tight, except for the desert, so hostile it was thought to be enough of a deterrent. But the migrants still try their luck

Helicopters, the wall, patrols and dog units: over the years, the US has locked everything down tight, except for the desert, so hostile it was thought to be enough of a deterrent. But the migrants still try their luck, walking further each time. This strategy has ‘turned the Tucson sector into a funnel of death,’ said Jean Kreyche, stopping her Jeep at the foot of the Sierrita mountains, on the Arizona side. Between 1999 and 2017, the bodies of more than 3,000 migrants were found in the sector; most had died of thirst, cold or falling into ravines while trying to evade the USBP.

Kreyche was leading a patrol for the Tucson Samaritans, attached to the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson and founded in 2002, when migrant deaths rose tenfold. Three times a week, she and a few volunteers go out to leave water and survival kits in the desert. The average age of the volunteers was 67.

Look for buzzards

In this featureless landscape where the wind whistles in the bushes, the Samaritans looked for buzzards circling low: to find bodies here, you look up, not down. They placed bottles of water along the paths. The migrants constantly change routes in their game of cat and mouse with the USBP, but they leave a trail: empty food wrappers and Red Bull cans, discarded jeans, sweaters, boxes of stimulants (guides force the migrants to take them so they will walk faster); the use-by dates suggested they’d been here recently. A child’s Hello Kitty sock under a cactus.

The Samaritans map the locations where they find bodies with red dots on their handheld GPS. The USBP sometimes finds migrants naked, mouths torn by cactus that they have tried to eat in delirium, or limbs stretched out as if they were trying to swim in the sand. Some have collapsed barely 50m from a water station. Kreyche said: ‘Many migrants have never left their home in the tropics before, and they have no idea how hostile the desert can be. To them, the desert is an abstract idea.’ They are poorly advised by their guides, and make many mistakes. ‘They don’t have hats, they wear dark clothing, they don’t carry enough water and they don’t have blankets for the night.’ A migrant with a sprained ankle will be left behind, and probably die.

Many bodies are never found: the USBP’s priority is to catch the living. Bodies decompose quickly in the desert, and coyotes scatter the bones. No More Deaths, a partner organisation of the Samaritans, estimates that more than 6,000 migrants have died since 2001, but ‘there’s no way of knowing exactly,’ said Maryada Vallet.‘What’s certain is that the desert is being used intentionally, as a deadly weapon.’The strategy has a name, which came into general use under President Clinton — ‘Prevention through Deterrence’. A local artist marks where bodies are found with wooden crosses. At one of these, the Samaritans’ GPS read: ‘Corona Vargas, Marco Antonio.13 October 2007. Probable hyperthermia.’ This migrant was lucky: at least he was identified.

The bodies are taken to Pima County morgue in Tucson. Medical examiner Greg Hess is the most overworked man in the city. When migrant deaths peaked in 2010, he had to use refrigerated trucks to store the bodies. He currently has 150 waiting to be identified. This year’s body count as of 1 April was 40, of which 38 were skeletal remains.‘In such cases, identification can take months, or even years.’The deceased’s family has to initiate the process by visiting a consulate or a humanitarian organisation, and providing a DNA sample. If a body remains desconocido (unknown), it will be cremated and the ashes sent to the municipal cemetery.

These illegal immigrants in Tucson, Arizona, are about to be transported to a detention centre

Hector Mata · AFP · Getty

Yet Tucson needs clandestine immigrant labour to keep it going. In this sense, all US cities have become border towns: small and large employers hire undocumented immigrants, while the authorities turn a blind eye. They are cheap, reliable workers, contribute to the economy, and pay their taxes. They work in restaurants and hotels, and on farms, or prepare meals in schools and hospitals. In Tucson, at dawn, they gather outside churches that the municipality classes as ‘sensitive areas’, which gives them some immunity from police, as long as they don’t commit a crime. Here they wait to get hired for the day, for construction work or gardening.

‘They do more than wash up in restaurants,’ said Kelzi Bartholomaei, a Mexican American who formerly owned Mother Hubbard’s Café and now runs her own butcher’s shop. ‘You can find them in old people’s homes, in personal care services... in every industry. I’m sad to say I miss the Bush years. He was really close to President Vicente Fox, and it was a friendlier climate. That’s when I got my citizenship. Now, with Trump, the farmers in Iowa who supply me can’t get anyone to work for them. Their crops are rotting in the fields. It’s a disaster.’

Customs officials have been extra zealous since Trump’s election, and the queues at border crossing are growing. The churches are concerned that they may lose their status as sanctuaries. ‘Raids have already started here,’ said Lisa McDaniel-Hutchings, a pastor I met at Amado, a small village half way between Tucson and the border. ‘Before the wall was militarised, you could come and go freely, in both directions.’ She thinks there should be more discussion of ‘the underlying causes of labour migration. It’s clear that free trade agreements have driven the Mexican peasantry into poverty. In a way, the US is to blame.’

Defenders of migrants’ rights see the USBP as brutes: 4,200 agents patrol the Tucson sector, which the US Customs and Border Protection website describes as ‘one of the busiest sectors in the country in both illegal alien apprehensions and marijuana seizures.’ The USBP, many of them Latinos, feel unloved, except by Trump, who has promised to hire 5,000 extra agents. The USBP doesn’t give interviews, but its labour union, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) agreed to talk to me. It was the only union in the US to support Trump’s presidential campaign. In Tucson, 80% of USBP agents are members.

Their leader, Art del Cueto, is vice-president of the NBPC and a media figurehead of Trumpism. He cultivates a macho image and for the last three years has co-hosted The Green Line, a podcast for USBP personnel with a conservative tone. The show rose from obscurity after an interview with Trump (8) in which he assured the USBP they had his full support. It has been financed from the start by the far-right online channel Breitbart News, formerly headed by Steve Bannon who now advises the president.

‘Immigration was a family affair’

Del Cueto was too busy to talk to me, but an NBPC lawyer did on his behalf. Jim Calle, a former journalist, has defended USBP agents for nearly 20 years in court cases, including those involving corruption or the killing of migrants. He confirmed that morale was higher since Trump’s election. ‘It’s allowed us to lift the lid on immigration, and start a discussion.’He has seen the job change a great deal in 20 years, with the militarisation of the border. ‘When I started out, in 1998, the migrants were all looking for work. They were coming over in groups of a hundred at a time. It wasn’t organised, it was a family affair. Now, the cartels control everything, and there are no more than six or eight migrants to a group. If you catch two migrants in day you’re doing well. The smugglers use tunnels and catapults to bring in drugs. They also use children, who climb the fence like monkeys as soon as the agents’ backs are turned. Watch the wall in Nogales for an hour, and you’ll see what I mean.’

Though its esprit de corps is strong, the USBP lacks transparency and its agents have been accused of brutality. At least 45 people are thought to have died at their hands between 2005 and 2014 (9). Few cases have come to trial, and no agent in the Tucson sector has ever been convicted, though three teenagers from the border area have died under suspicious circumstances. José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, 16, was killed on his way home to Nogales in 2012.

‘We demand justice’

His death is still causing controversy in the border area. The spot where he died on Calle Internacional, opposite the wall, is marked by a cross, a bunch of plastic flowers, and a sticker in Spanish: ‘We demand justice.’ The agent accused, stationed on the Arizona side of the border, shot the teen 10 times, of which eight in the back. He insisted at first that the boy had been throwing stones, and that he had been defending himself, but witnesses deny this. The killing was captured on video, but the USBP had not handed the film over to the court. Calle said it had been compressed accidentally, and was now too poor quality to be useful. Fourteen thick files were lined up on his desk. The tragedy has become a complex international incident, and lawyers on both sides are busy refining their arguments.

Calle talked about the USBP’s unique position as ‘a paramilitary force tasked with actively confronting clandestine migrants,’ its exemplary work and the dangers its agents face. Whenever an incident occurs, ‘the agents concerned are interviewed by an internal board. We estimate one migrant in 20 or even 10 is a smuggler. We find deportees from El Salvador who are trying it on again, and gang members. They can run, they know how to fight, and they love to claim they have been victims of Border Patrol brutality. It’s usually the migrant’s word against the agent’s.

A report submitted to the DHS last year recommended 39 measures to reduce ‘unconstitutional use of force’ and ‘risks of endemic corruption’ within US Customs and Border Protection (10). Cartels have already infiltrated the organisation and turned dozens of agents. The document, drafted by senior military officers and agents of the DEA, describes an organisation in crisis because it has expanded too fast and is unable to discipline its members. But after Trump’s victory, any attempt at reform is off the cards. The White House has promised to free agents from their legal constraints.